red blood in his veins, the blood of a great, misunderstood race, paints what he sees on the top of God’s earth.  He is not a book but a normal nature-lover.  He is in love with light, and by his treatment of relative values creates the illusion of sun-flooded landscapes.  He does not cry for the “sun,” as did Oswald Alving; it comes to him at the beckoning of his brush.  His many limitations are but the defects of his good qualities.

Sorolla is sympathetic.  He adores babies and delights in dancing.  His babies are irresistible.  He can sound the Mitleid motive without a suspicion of odious sentimentality.  What charm there is in some of his tiny children as they lean their heads on their mothers!  They fear the ocean, yet are fascinated by it.  Near by is a mother and child in bed.  They sleep.  The right hand of the mother stretches, instinctively, toward the infant.  It is the sweet, unconscious gesture of millions of mothers.  On one finger of the hand there is just a hint of gold from a ring.  The values of the white counterpane and the contrast of dark-brown hair on the pillow are truthfully expressed.  One mother and babe, all mothers and babes, are in this picture.  Turn to that old rascal in a brown cloak, who is about to taste a glass of wine.  A snag gleams white in his sly, thirsty mouth.  The wine tastes fine, eh!  You recall Goya.  As for the boys swimming, the sensations of darting and weaving through velvety waters are produced as if by wizardry.  But you never think of Sorolla’s line, for line, colour, idea, actuality are merged.  The translucence of this sea in which the boys plash and plunge is another witness to the verisimilitude of Sorolla’s vision.  Boecklin’s large canvas at the new Pinakothek, Munich, is often cited as a tour de force of water painting.  We allude to the mermaids and mermen playing in the trough of a greenish sea.  It is mere “property” water when compared to Sorolla’s closely observed and clearly reproduced waves.  Rhythm—­that is the prime secret of his vitality.

His portraiture, when he is interested in his sitters, is excellent.  Beruete is real, so Cossio, the author of the El Greco biography; so the realistic novelist Blanco Ibanez; but the best, after those of his, Sorolla’s, wife and children, is that of Frantzen, a photographer, in the act of squeezing the bulb.  It is a frank characterisation.  The various royalties and high-born persons whose counterfeit presentments are accomplished with such genuine effort are interesting; but the heart is missing.  Cleverness there is in the portraits of Alphonse; and his wife’s gorgeous costume should be the envy of our fashionable portrait manufacturers.  It is under the skies that Sorolla is at ease.  Monet, it must not be forgotten, had two years’ military service in Morocco; Sorolla has always lived, saturated himself in the rays of a hot sun and painted beneath the hard blue dome of Spanish skies.

Sorolla is a painting temperament, and the freshening breezes and sunshine that emanate from his canvases should drive away the odours of the various chemical cook-shops which are called studios in our “world of art.”